I think the main feature that's exciting for me is the gpgpu potential.
Even just looking at the ability to accelerate llms in the browser on any device without an installation is awesome
For example: fleetwood.dev has a really cool project that does audio transcription in browser on the GPU: https://whisper-turbo.com/#
Hah that was me ~12 years ago trying to get WebCL (OpenCL) through the same gate keepers. Meanwhile, in Python, we are doing multi-node multi-GPU. Maybe OpenAI's and soon Apple's success with LLMs will change the economics for them.
This is why I don't like Khronos APIs, even when actually those are the ones I know relatively well, the way they work end up being a much worse experience than writting backend specific plugins ourselves with much better tooling, also the extension spaghetti ultimately doesn't save us from multiple code paths anyway, given the differences between some of those extensions.
To pick your example, something like PyTorch ends up being a much better developer experience, similar to game engines, than relying on Khronos APIs.
Your project sounds interesting as well. Do you have a social channel or GitHub for this project? Or is there something I can follow to be updated when you release it?
I'd love to learn more about what you're working on as I've been wanting to integrate shadeup with existing game engines like unreal/unity but realizing it would be a massive undertaking.
I will warn that it's mostly been rewritten at this point, but most changes haven't made it to the repo due to being held up by my current employer's legal team. Most of the code is also poorly written due to it mostly being written during half asleep/burned out state. With all the "don't judge me to hard"'s out of the way, https://gitlab.com/Cieric/gellang
I don't currently have plans to integrate with an existing game engine, just my own. I have however considered in the past integrating with Godot, so that would be my first target if I do ever attempt it.
I also was assuming no one would use my project professionally so the idea was to be a superset of glsl so any glsl code could be pasted into a script and be compiled without any modifications. That would aid in debugging gpu code in an actual debugger without needing to rewrite it.
Once all the paper work is finished additional updates should start rolling out again since it would just be reviewing the new changes not everything again. Hope your expectations are in line, I'm not trying to under or over sell my project. I was just wanted to fix my own gripes with the projects of the time.
My startup has been working on WebGPU support for Unreal Engine 5 for the past several years, and we've already achieved multiple demos that will be going live relatively soon.
Shadeup will try to fit it all into one command encoder but may need to split if the coder:
1. Manually flushes
2. Reads/downloads a buffer on the CPU
Most calls are lazily evaluated, and a small dep graph is built as you reference/draw things.
That being said, shadeup does make some perf sacrifices in the name of simplicity. I'd say it's well suited to prototyping and learning. Of course, once you have a working prototype of something porting it to native wgsl should be easy
Have you thought about having an "eject" command? For example, Create React App had an eject command to go from the self-contained version to a full customisable Webpack app.
Users can already kinda do this by showing the compiled output, but the js engine itself is still tucked away. At some point, I would probably have a tree shaken full output for each shadeup.
